Accessibility – this is also a topic for erotic content. After all, 7.8 million people with disabilities live in Germany alone. Based on the need that websites should also be barrier-free, a lot is happening in the adult entertainment industry. There is now the option to activate subtitles on some erotic videos you can find out there.
After all, the development of sex-positive porn is through an action which often takes place in the film and this should be accessible to people with hearing and/or visual impairments. To make this possible, the audio description option was introduced in many erotic videos: Here a narrative voice reproduces the action of each clip in great detail, for example in which actors can be seen, what they are wearing or what positions they practice. The original sound of the videos continues to run in the background. This category also includes audio porn, which works without any picture, and tells of the erotic experience only via soundtrack. It works like a radio, only it’s about exciting and erotic encounters and even sex. In our LISTEN area you will find our exciting audio stories.
Playboy For Blind People
In addition to these innovations, there are numerous erotic projects coming from the offline world: One that we particularly like is Playboy for blind people by artist Lisa J. Murphy from Toronto. Murphy believes we live in a highly sexualized world that often leaves the people with visual impairments behind. Because of this, she herself decided to do something about it. The result is her artistically designed book: “Tactile Mind”. The touch picture book was published in 2007, but only received media attention two years later. Her publication contains several 3D images of naked women and men along with inscriptions in Braille – the writing that blind people can read with the help of keys.
The book holds a proud price of around 200 euros, which is due to the complex production process: According to Murphy, the production of such a picture takes up to 50 (!) Hours. “First I took pictures of my friends in their underwear, then enlarged the pictures and shaped them by hand in clay,” she says. “Then I made thermoformed copies. I used my own little thermoforming machine at home for this, so it took a while to make a single copy. ”We were interested in which of the erotic motifs were particularly challenging to form. According to Murphy, it’s a woman’s butt: “It took me days to model all the curves correctly. It should be nice and even, I wanted to give it a feminine softness so that it actually felt like a woman’s bottom. It took me days to model all the curves correctly. But recently I got the feedback that it really feels like a woman’s butt in a thong, ”she says. Well, you have to start there!
As for whether it’s art or porn, “it depends on the eye of the beholder,” she says.
Playboy in Braille
The big players on the market have already come up with the idea of making erotic images accessible to people with disabilities. Playboy magazine published some issues for blind people in the 1970s: printed on brown paper, simply with the Playboy logo on the cover. However, in the editions there were no pictures, only articles in Braille. A Playboy without pictures is initially a rather unusual product. The decision against images is probably due to the fact that erotic images cannot simply be translated into Braille. The low elevation of the Braille letters would probably result in a kind of “guessing picture”, which allows a naked woman to be felt, but which would lack the eroticism due to the low plasticity of the image.
... and around the neighborhood?
Another exciting approach is the sign dictionary for the Reeperbahn. Here you learn to use sign language to talk about what no one supposedly talks about. Wolfgang Schirrmeyer came up with the idea, he has been deaf since he was two years old. For years, the author led tours on the Reeperbahn for deaf tourists from Japan, Israel and Sweden.
It is remarkable that there is no one uniform German sign language, but rather many regional varieties and thus different dialects. The sign language is not particularly uptight by the way; rather, the gestures often indicate the intended sexual act quite explicitly. For example, with the gesture for a blow job: Here you form a circle with your fingers and thumb and bring it to your mouth. A lot of people understand this straight away.
Through this publication, these sexual words have now been bundled in one book for the first time. The aim behind the project is to make sexual signs, and the social taboo that goes with them public.
The topic of accessibility has made it to the adult industry. The topic was started with the aim of including people with disabilities, and a first step in the right direction was taken. We look forward to many more exciting ideas!
